1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a cloud system and a license management method for cloud services, and more particularly to a license management method for performing access control for various cloud services based on, for example, user license information.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, various cloud services are provided over the Internet. For these services, an authentication system is generally provided as a security measure that performs, for example, maintenance and management of IDs and passwords as well as access control. Accordingly, users generally purchase licenses for each service that they want before they use the service. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-333928 discloses a service operation method that performs authentication and license management for various services. According to this service operation method, access control is performed based on license information managed for each service, and control is performed for each service so as to decide whether or not the service is available.
With the conventional technique, however, because the access control based on the license information is performed centrally by a cloud server, it is difficult for an administrator user or a customer licensed for a service to further assign access rights to general users or customers who use the service, based on the license. For example, an administrator user or a customer who has been granted a trial license for testing a service by the server enables general users to use the trial license. The general users can thereby enforce access rights assigned to the trial license. However, even if, for example, the administrator user wants to assign different access rights to different general users, it is difficult to control rights included in the granted license on a user-by-user basis.
The increase in the types of licenses requires the server to carry out various types of processing such as license switch processing for switching from a trial license to a permanent license. At this time, the access rights assigned to individual users need to be sequentially updated in the license switch processing. Such processing, however, requires a very long time in a system used by a large number of users such as a cloud service. Accordingly, it has been difficult to update access rights assigned to individual users in synchronization with the license switch processing. Also, for the same reason, it has been difficult to update the access rights of individual users in synchronization with the changes in the license status such as termination and recovery of license.